August 2003
High-speed connection expands access to Scholars Portal
Spending time in libraries has become a lot less attractive. Faculty and students have turned increasingly to online digital sources for their research to save time, increase productivity and find new ways of incorporating access to digital libraries into research and education.
The Scholars Portal is Ontario's digital library located at the University of Toronto's Robarts Library . All 19 Ontario universities, as well as specific electronic publishers, are licensed to access the electronic contents of the digital library. The libraries of colleges are expected to gain access in the future.
The Portal is already in the process of increasing its digital library from 2.9 million articles to six million articles to meet these needs, and is projected to have as many as 20 million electronic journal articles in the not-too-distant future, making this resource one of the largest in the world.
At 900k for a typical article, existing download connections can't handle the high volume demanded by faculty and students across Ontario.
"Once we have the ORION platform to give libraries easy, efficient access to digital files, I expect the number of downloads to increase at an extraordinary rate," said Peter Clinton, Director, Information Technology Services at the University of Toronto. "I also expect the volume of new digital resources at the library to increase to meet the demand."
With connection speeds of ORION's broadband pipeline, the Portal will meet increased demand with ease, enabling much greater volumes of data to be downloaded at much faster speeds.
Ontario's universities downloaded over two million digital documents from the Digital Library at the University of Toronto in the past year.
"The sheer volume is increasing rapidly and will increase even faster as the capacity of the download pipeline increases with ORION," added Clinton.
Leslie Weir, Chief Librarian at the University of Ottawa couldn't agree more.
"From text to images to video, our resources are moving toward a much greater emphasis on the digital library," said Weir. "In fact, digital access has even become a part of the classroom experience for some courses. For all of these resources to work effectively, we need to be able to mesh our digital resources with the needs and demands of the users. High-speed perpetual access is required, and ORION's broadband capabilities are the solution."
In a related development, the University of Toronto is testing a new system for a searchable, downloadable database of wide-ranging scholarly material in every known digital format. Known as T-Space, the project stems from D-Space, originally a joint development between MIT and Hewlett-Packard, which has since become the D-space Federation of seven universities ¾ Cambridge, Columbia, Ohio State, Rochester, Washington, Cornell and Toronto.
Conceivably, the amount of data stored in T-Space could reach sizes that are almost impossible to fathom. High-resolution images for one medical research project alone can require more than two terabytes in size. That's more information than can be stored in forty thousand four-drawer filing cabinets. It's possible that T-Space may store data in the petabyte range or, according to SearchStorage.com, more than twenty million four-drawer filing cabinets of information.
When T-Space comes online later this year, ORION will be in position to act as the best possible pipeline for effortlessly accessing and distributing this much information on demand.
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